It was some consolation to Archie Leach that he was kept, in his words, ‘happily, gainfully and steadily employed’ by the Shuberts for almost three years.46 He was, in fact, doing about as well in the theatre at that time as he would have done with comparable work in Hollywood. The Shuberts were paying him $450 per week, which allowed him to purchase his first car, a Packard sport phaeton, then considered one of the finest of American-made automobiles. He was a young man who was sharply aware of the value of appearances. ‘That was my trouble,’ he recalled, ‘always trying to impress someone.’47
His next stage role was as Max Gunewald, a vain, superficial young man, in A Wonderful Night, Fannt Mitchell’s rather loose re-working of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. It opened at the Majestic Theater on 31 October 1929, two days after the blackest day of the Wall Street Crash, and closed, promptly, in February 1930. It had received mixed reviews, as had Archie Leach. One critic wrote, somewhat gnomically, that ‘Mr Archie Leach, as the soprano’s straying baritone, brings a breath of elfin Broadway to his role’, but another disagreed, claiming that Leach, ‘who feels that acting in something by Johann Strauss calls for distinction, is somewhat at a loss as to how to achieve it. The result is a mixture of John Barrymore and cockney.’48
After a few weeks back working in vaudeville, Leach received a new assignment from the Shuberts, but at a somewhat reduced salary. On the verge of bankruptcy, the Shuberts were packaging streamlined versions of some of their earlier successes to offer to the public at ‘pre-war prices’ from three dollars down to fifty cents. Leach went on tour in the musical The Street Singer,49 for the next nine months, he toured through the provincial towns where unemployment was starting to put many people out on the streets. The show had to gross two thousand dollars a night just to break even. It failed, and was one of the contributing factors that caused the Shubert Corporation to file for receivership in 1931.
That year was the most dismal one for legitimate theatre in the US for two decades. Almost half of all Broadway theatres were closed. The only work that Archie Leach could find was at the open-air Municipal Opera in St Louis, Missouri, where J. J. Shubert produced a summer-long series of musical revivals. Although Cary Grant later recalled the 8,000-seat amphitheatre in Forest Park as being ‘delightful’,50 and the summer season as ‘glorious’,51 it was gruelling work, with a new role to be learned every two weeks. The plots were often extravagant, the productions lavish and the lighting effects, in particular, were spectacular. Audiences were rather less discriminating than on Broadway, but they appreciated professional performances. Leach, usually playing the romantic lead, stood out as a darkly handsome young man. Local reviews were generally positive. He was noticed. When the season ended, and Leach returned to New York, he was invited to appear in a one-reeler movie entitled Singapore Sue. He was engaged on 8 May 1931,52 for six days, by the Paramount Public Corporation; the movie was shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studio, and he was paid $150 for his performance.
In the 1930s, short subjects served not only to flesh out an exhibitor’s bill, but also allowed the studios (particularly Paramount and Warners, who both had major production centres in New York which enabled them to lure stars from Broadway and vaudeville) to test new talent inexpensively. Singapore Sue was not destined for any special promotion, but it was, none the less, the first serious opportunity that Archie Leach had to attract the attention of Hollywood producers. He played one of four American sailors visiting the Chinese character actor Anna Chang’s café in Singapore. Dressed in a white tropical uniform, handsome in a rather over-ripe way and wearing make-up that made him appear eye-catchingly pale, he smiled falsely and mumbled, through clenched teeth, his few lines of dialogue without any conviction. It was, quite clearly, a discomforting experience, and one which remained a sufficiently painful memory to cause Cary Grant in 1970 to seek to persuade the organisers of the Academy Awards tribute to him to omit the planned excerpt from Singapore Sue.53 His friend Gregory Peck, who was president of the Academy at the time, sympathised:
In that early shot Cary hadn’t acquired the poise and confidence, the kind of looseness before the camera that he later had. He still looked like English music-hall. I know how I would feel if someone showed a lot of footage of me before I had smoothed out my craft.54
Nothing came of the work.55 In August 1931, Leach asked to be released from his Shubert theatre contracts. The Shuberts obliged. At the end of that month he was engaged to play a character named Cary Lockwood opposite Fay Wray in her husband John Monk Saunders’s play Nikki. It opened at the Longacre Theater in New York on 29 September 1931. Leach was paid $375 for each of the first three weeks, and $500 per week for the remainder of the run. The show, however, did not endear itself to audiences for whom the theatre was now an expensive luxury, and, although it was moved to the George M. Cohan Theater in a desperate bid to save it, Nikki closed after only thirty-nine performances.
In November 1931, shortly after Nikki closed, Archie Leach sub-let his small apartment and decided, along with his friend Phil Charig (who had written the music for the show), to visit California. Having worked steadily for more than three years, he felt he could now afford to take a vacation. Fay Wray, to whom he had become very close during the run of the show, had been offered a part in the movie that RKO Radio was planning from Edgar Wallace’s story King Kong. She had invited Leach to follow her.56 Other people had, at various times during the previous two years, encouraged him to move on and attempt to establish a movie career in Hollywood, and now, after yet another show had ended – in his view – prematurely, the time, at last, seemed right.
CHAPTER V Inventing Cary Grant
Yes, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated youngman with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest ofChinese boxes.
NATHANAEL WEST
I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I wasplaying. I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became thatperson. Or he became me.
CARY GRANT
If Archie Leach, as he left New York for Hollywood, had come to think of himself as a self-made man, then Cary Grant, as he stepped out into the Southern Californian sunlight, would come to think of himself as a man-made self. Archie Leach had learned a great deal in a short period about how to perform, but, so far, he had learned little about how best he might use this technical knowledge to lend a certain distinctiveness to his own performances. Cary Grant would bring an unusual, attractive, imaginative personality to complement the existing solid technique. The change of name, in itself, was banal; it was common practice in Hollywood, where words were put to the service of pictures and one’s name functioned as a sub-title for one’s image. The change of identity, however, was profound; the new name heralded a new self.
Archie Leach did not arrive in Los Angeles with